BuzzFeed undermines all journalists with Trump 'dossier'

BuzzFeed just picked up the ball and raced down the field into the wrong end zone of American media life.

I’ve never had much respect for BuzzFeed.

But I have only contempt for it now. And it is not just for publishing information about President-elect Donald Trump and Russia that it did not verify. It’s also for Ben Smith, BuzzFeed’s editor, attempting to explain the move in high-sounding rhetoric suggesting that doing so is what journalism looks like today.

"Publishing this document was not an easy or simple call, and people of good will may disagree with our choice,” Smith wrote in a memo to BuzzFeed staffers that was made public. “But publishing this dossier reflects how we see the job of reporters in 2017.”

I hope printing innuendo and rumor of highly questionable provenance is not the job of reporters in 2017, or this profession has become more debased than the harshest of our critics contends.

In crossing one of the few lines left for mainstream news outlets, a demand for some level of verification, BuzzFeed could not have given Trump better ammunition with which to vilify the press as dishonest, biased and all the other claims he makes in trying to inoculate himself against valid criticism.

I think the hiring of Van Susteren, most recently of Fox News, is a smart one that suggests MSNBC...

I am not going to print any of the allegations here. You can go to BuzzFeed and put yourself in its grubby hands if you want to see 35 pages of gossip about Trump and Russia.

The word “dossier” has been used to describe it. But that’s as phony as the language Smith used to try and wrap his site’s reckless click-chasing in the mantle of journalism.

If BuzzFeed was really doing anything approaching journalism in trying to confirm the information it published, it would have known that the “dossier” had been available to other journalists and they passed on it because they could not confirm.

A Netflix film titled “Barry," a two-hour National Geographic documentary, and a Ta-Nehisi Coates piece titled “My President Was Black” are among the latest attempts to define the legacy of Barack Obama.

A Netflix film titled “Barry," a two-hour National Geographic documentary, and a Ta-Nehisi Coates piece titled “My President Was Black” are among the latest attempts to define the legacy of Barack Obama.